And there were other camps out there, too, other smoke apart from the human crescent facing the pass. Far north, barely visible, was smoke from the dark, oily fires of what might be a goblin encampment. And nearer at hand, on high ridges aside from the human camps, were the little tendrils of what might be ogre fires.
Slide Tolec felt little sympathy for any of them. They did not belong in Kal-Thax.
Squatting beneath the stone overhang that shaded the Theiwar outpost caves, Slide peered outward, estimating the fires, and idly fingered the blade at his side. The numbers were increasing out there. Soon they would come, some of them at least, trying once again to penetrate the mountain lands.
There were so many this year! Slide felt that maybe it was well that the Daewar had come — from their own lairs far north on the hidden face of Sky’s End Mountain — to aid in the defense. Slide had no more use for the arrogant, jovial “gold-molders” than did any other Theiwar. The Daewar were upstarts — only within the past century had they formed a thane — and yet they seemed to thrive. And they didn’t hesitate to display their success. Every Daewar he had ever seen wore a fortune in the finest of armor and the gaudiest of attire.
And they could fight! While the Theiwar were expert at sabotage and ambush, and while none could match the dark-sighted Daergar in a night attack, few would dare to challenge the gold-molders in direct battle. The old Theiwar chief, Crouch Redfire, had badly weakened the Theiwar when he tested them by sending them into Daewar territory. The Daewar captain, Gem Bluesleeve, and his “Golden Hammer” elite troops had decimated the Theiwar raiders.
The term “gold-molder” was intended as an insult — implying that the Daewar were as soft and malleable as the bright metal that was the color of their hair and beards, and which they favored for ornamentation. But only an idiot or a suicide would so insult a Daewar to his face.
Though Slide resented the brightly clad sun people, now, seeing the smoke of the human campfires above the foothills, he was glad that the Daewar were here, and that they were part of the treaty of exclusion which kept Kal-Thax closed to aliens.
From the shadows behind him a deep voice rasped, “Slide! Have you gone to sleep there? What do you see?”
Scowling, Slide turned slightly to glance back into the depths. “I’m looking at what you told me to look at, … Sire. The outsiders are massing more and more in the foothills. They will be coming soon.”
“Soon?” Twist Cutshank’s voice mocked him. “Soon? What does ‘soon’ mean? This morning? Today? Next month?”
Slide stifled a sigh of disgust. How did the chieftain of the Theiwar expect him to read the minds of humans? “Today, maybe,” he answered. “There are at least a hundred fires out there now. They’ll have to move soon or starve.”
“A hundred fires?” He heard the stomp of heavy boots and knew that the chieftain and others wanted to see for themselves. “All together?”
“No, they’re scattered over many miles. But they’ve discovered now that they can’t pass the gorge, and the cliffs of Shalomar block them to the south, so they are massing below the pass. Like they always do, except now there are many more.”
As Twist Cutshank emerged onto the shelf, adjusting his mesh faceplate over craggy, sullen features, Slide moved aside for him, as people usually did. Twist Cutshank was not tall — he stood barely more than four feet high — but he was massive, with huge shoulders and almost no neck at all. His arms were as thick and knotty as the boles of mountain pines, and at least as long as his stubby, powerful legs.
“Fugitives,” he rumbled, then shielded his eyes against the morning sun to peer into the distance. “Rust!” he said. “There must be thousands of them!”
“I told you,” Slide Tolec muttered, then raised his voice. “They’ll be coming soon, up the valley.”
That was the one certainty, here in the eastern border lands of Kal-Thax. Intruders, when they came, would push westward across the foothills and into the wide, climbing valley that pointed toward the crest of Cloudseeker Mountain. It was the route they always followed. The way to Kal-Thax from the east was like a funnel. Across the plains of eastern Ergoth, migrants held to the narrowing “corridor” of wild lands, avoiding the northerly routes which led to the human city of Xak Tsaroth, where thieves and slavers waited to take their toll, and avoiding the ice barrens to the south. From the wilds, they slipped into the settled regions and were harried there by knights and companies of armed wardens, protecting the villages.
Reaching the foothills, the wanderers quickly found that the Grand Gorge was impassable to humans, and the Cliffs of Shalomar were unscalable by humans. So they set their eyes on the three crags atop Cloudseeker — those massive, upright fangs of stone that the dwarves called the Windweavers — and entered the narrowing valley that was their only route. And there, for more years than even the dwarves could remember, they were attacked and driven away or killed.
It was the only thing that every thane, tribe, and band of dwarves in Kal-Thax agreed on: Kal-Thax was closed to outside races and must remain so.
The “funnel” led directly into the territory of the Theiwar and was the reason that the Theiwar had become the first thane — or organized, land-holding nation — in Kal-Thax. Originally just small tribes of Einar, the Theiwar were cliff-dwelling people and had found fine profits in waylaying the humans and others who occasionally wandered into these mountains. Ambush, slaughter, and looting of outsiders had become a major industry in times past, and Thane Theiwar had profited from it.
Most travelers from the bog-lands and the plains never realized they had entered Kal-Thax until they were many miles up the rugged path among the foothills, and none realized that the path toward the three crags was a trap. Just below Galefang, the largest of the Windweavers, the path veered southward between high walls, directly into the canyon below the Theiwar caves. By the dozens and the hundreds, strangers had died there, and the Theiwar had looted and disposed of their bodies.
But it was different now. This time the intruders were a massive force, and the Theiwar did not have the field to themselves. The Daewar had come, arrogant as always, bypassing the Theiwar encampment without so much as a by-your-leave for trespassing on Theiwar grounds, and now were encamped right out on the promontory — a shoulder of the mountain, in the middle of the pass — as though to take charge of all defenses. A few miles beyond the Daewar camp, Slide knew, were hordes of grim, squinting Daergar, hiding their faces from the bright sunlight that hurt their dark-seeker eyes. They had come from their dimly lit tunnels and their precious mines to join in the defense of Kal-Thax. Here and there also were bands of the wild, erratic Klar, brandishing their bludgeons and waiting for the chance to bash a few human skulls.
In all, it was a grim and deadly array of dwarven fighters, none of the groups on very good terms with any of the others, but all determined that outsiders would not enter the mountain realm.
Slide wondered, though silently, what kind of fighting force they all might be if they could for once get together and act in unison. It was a foolish notion. Never in all the centuries since the Theiwar — and then the Daewar and Daergar and, to some extent, even the Klar — had become organized thanes, never had they acted in unison on any issue except the pact to keep aliens out.
In the distance to the east, the smoke of the human camps was trailing away on the breeze, and Slide, peering through his mesh faceplate, saw the beginnings of movement there. It was what he had expected. Someone in the foothills had taken charge, and now the humans — some of them at least — were on the move, heading up the pass.
He squinted, and Brule Vaportongue edged up beside him, his face hidden by the Daergar mask he wore. Brule was half Daergar and shunned the daylight.